notices anything about her, he can say nothing to her and all he can do is pretend not to know what is going on and behave as though he has seen and heard nothing.”
Muḥammad Qindīl al-Baqlī (ed.), under the title Our Egyptian Village before the Revolution – 1 (Qaryatunā l-Miṣriyyah qabla l-thawrah – 1). The retitling underlines the ideological impetus behind the work’s republication during the Nasserist era.
Mehren’s article is devoted mainly to the historical and literary background and a summary of the contents, and it has a limited Arabic-French glossary of words occurring in the work and “little used in the literary language” (Mehren, “Et Par Bildrag Bedømmelse”).
Spitta, Grammatik, Texts VIII and X. Spitta’s two texts combine three stories from Brains Confounded in an order different from that of the original and with passages originally in literary Arabic translated into colloquial. Spitta probably transcribed the stories as they were read to him by an informant from the book (Spitta, Grammatik; see, further, Davies, Profile, 34–35).
The issue of whether or not the “Ode” is “genuine” is inextricably bound up with question of al-Shirbīnī’s motives in writing Brains Confounded and his attitude towards its subjects. Arguments in support of a literalist reading are comprehensively presented and analyzed by Baer (“Significance,” 25–35), according to whom, in the light of the renewed interest in and empathy for the peasant that came with the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, “Shirbīnī’s book confronted [Egyptian scholars] with a difficult problem. How should they explain that a native Egyptian writer born himself in an Egyptian village mocked and despised the fellah as if he expressed the views of the fellah’s Turkish and Mamluk oppressors?” (p. 28). Baer detects two responses to this problem. The first is to see al-Shirbīnī in a favorable light. Scholars taking this approach believe that al-Shirbīnī intended to condemn the exploitation and oppression of Egyptians by the Ottomans “by describing the poverty of the people and their oppression by the foreign kāshifs and multazims” (idem); he also intended to condemn the fallāḥ’s cultural backwardness in order to “arouse the ʿulamāʾ . . . and remind them of their responsibility to educate society properly” (p. 29). Most writers who espouse these ideas explain al-Shirbīnī’s apparent hostility to the peasant as camouflage to protect the author from a putative (but, in fact, nonexistent) Ottoman censorship. A second group holds that, while al-Shirbīnī was hostile to the peasant and the book “clearly reflects the social struggle between fellahs and townsmen, their derision by them and the townsmen’s arrogance in their treatment of the peasants” (p. 32), the author expressed these negative sentiments either because he did not write the book of his own free will or because he did so to ingratiate himself with the Ottoman authorities; an extension of the latter theory would have it that al-Shirbīnī was an agent of the same authorities, who employed him to deride the poem by “the unknown popular poet Abū Shādūf, the voice of the silent oppressed,” as one scholar of this persuasion characterizes him (p. 34).
A shorter version of the article (lacking the discussion of the debate over attitudes and motives) appeared as “Fellah and Townsman in Ottoman Egypt: A Study of Shirbīnī’s Hazz al-Quḥūf,” Asian and African Studies [Jerusalem] 8 (1972): 221–56. Muhsin al-Musawi, The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters, devotes a chapter to Brains Confounded, describing it as a “contribution to contrafaction” of critical importance to the literature of the period; unfortunately, it appeared too recently to allow a consideration of his arguments.
“The documents are full of numerous examples of the neglect of the dykes or their cutting before the irrigation of distant areas, leading to the non-irrigation of thousands of feddons in those areas” (Ibrāhīm, Al-Azamāt, 109).
Baer quotes Aḥmad al-Jazzār Bāshā, “Behind some of the villages there are small villages without minarets. The people of Egypt call them kafr” (Baer, “Significance,” 8). Numerous anecdotes in Brains Confounded attest, however, to the existence of mosques, albeit of a primitive sort, in the kufūr.
A new wave of Sufi thought, based on what Ahmet Karamustafa calls “socially deviant renunciation,” arose in Iran and Anatolia in the thirteenth century and soon spread to Syria and Egypt (Karamustafa, Friends, 10). According to the same source, “ethnically . . . the leaders—and one suspects the rank and file—of the movement at this stage were not Arabs but mostly Iranians” (ibid., 55). However, Sabra has pointed out that, “while there is not much doubt that the leaders were Iranians, the composition of the rank and file is less clear. It is not out of the question that locals joined these groups” (Sabra, Poverty, 29). There is nothing in Brains Confounded to suggest that the dervishes referred to there were anything but Egyptians.
